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Saturday, September 17, 2011

Okay. Well. That was something. I'll be spending some time in the next few days trying to decide what plants to drop from the competition (if I'm just unable to cut it down to 128, I'll add another round of competition and give most of the contestants byes for that round, until we arrive at 128 -- it's maybe not fair to the plants that have one more match than the others, but if it's the best we can do then it's the best we can do), and then at some point next week, we'll start voting.

Meanwhile, we're back to something resembling the usual posting for the next few days.

Sheba in her crate. She doesn't spend time in there much during the day, but tends to retire around 9 or 10 PM if the husband's in his office (which is where the crate lives).

Unfortunately, nothing terribly interesting happened to Sheba this week. The closest we came to interesting was, on I think Tuesday, Sheba was resting quietly on the couch with the husband as he was watching TV, then she suddenly yelped like she'd been injured. Which she'd never done that before, so this was kind of alarming to the husband and me.

It seemed to be a foot thing, because she growled when we tried to look at her feet, but after we persisted in trying for ten or fifteen minutes, she let us look and touch without growling, and her feet didn't look at all unusual. So I'm thinking maybe a foot fell asleep. That happens to dogs too, right? Or at least there's no reason I can think of why it shouldn't happen to dogs.

Wednesday, September 14, 2011

UPDATE: Nominations are now closed. I appreciate everybody's input.
The list of contestants will be revealed tomorrow afternoon; I expect voting to begin in the middle of next week but can't promise anything yet.

I had an idea a long, long time ago. The idea was that I wanted to pit houseplants against one another in a single-elimination tournament to determine which was the "best," with "best" being determined by reader votes. I was going to call it the "Rumble Among the Jungle."

And then I sat on that idea for a very long time, because the first step, obviously, would be to come up with a list of contestants, and I wasn't sure how to do that.

For some reason, the idea's come back to me in the last week or so, and I've decided to narrow it down to the most commonly sold plants, with a few other qualifiers.

1. They should be sold as potted plants, not as fruits, rhizomes, or whatever -- so pineapples and avocado trees are out.
2. They should be plants which one might reasonably be expected to grow indoors year round, if the situation demanded, which rules out forced bulbs like daffodils and hyacinths.
3. They should be plants which could be easily found and purchased by someone who was looking for them, within his/r local garden center / supermarket / home-improvement store "scene," within a year of beginning to look. (This is so that common but seasonal plants like Schlumbergera or poinsettias can be included.)

I'm also limiting the experiment to 128 slots, which is why this post. (128 seemed like as large of a power of 2 as I could manage without dragging it all out indefinitely. I figure voting 128 plants down to one big winner should take about 2 months: a little long, perhaps, but manageable.) Naturally, I wound up choosing a few too many, and lumping species and varieties together in ways which may or may not make sense, so the main purpose of this post is to show y'all the possible contestants and ask for feedback about who's been unfairly left off the list, who's nowhere near common enough where you live to be included on the list, and who should be lumped together into one slot or split up into several.

Also: I don't have usable photos for a few of the plants on the list; you'll know which ones when you get there. If you have a photo you'd let me use (ideally showing both foliage and flower, on a relatively plain background, but I'll settle), send it to me by e-mail, or point me to the web address, and I'll update the post.

PATSP's next new post will be Saturday's Sheba/Nina picture, so we have a few days to ponder and discuss all of this, start placing bets as to who will win, etc. Readers who are not nerdy enough to care about any of this are asked to be patient. It's only a few days.

The final list of contestants will be up to me, because it's my blog, but I wouldn't be asking for input if I didn't intend to weigh it in the decision.

Official actual voting will commence at some point next week, once I 1) have a final contestant list, 2) set up the brackets, and 3) start posting the polls. I intend to continue writing regular posts in the mornings, in addition to the RATJ posts in the afternoon.

So here are the possible contestants so far:

1. Acalypha reptans (chenille plant)
2 people have recommended removing this plant from the list.

19. Austrocylindropuntia subulata monstrose (Eve's needle)
Photo credit: ArséniureDeGallium, at Wikimedia Commons.
2 people have recommended removing this plant from the list.
1 person has recommended not removing this plant from the list.

76. Jasminum spp. (jasmine; shown: J. sambac?)
1 person has recommended removing this plant from the list.
[I'm not counting Ivynettle's vote to remove because the category includes all Jasminum spp., not just sambac]

77. Kalanchoe blossfeldiana (flaming katy, kalanchoe; shown: NOID)
1 person has recommended removing this plant from the list.
3 people have recommended not removing this plant from the list.

82. Mimosa pudica (sensitive plant)
Photo credit: Liza Wheeler. Used by permission.
2 people have recommended removing this plant from the list.
3 people have recommended not removing this plant from the list.

108. Podocarpus macrophyllus (buddhist pine)
5 people have recommended removing this plant from the list.

109. Polyscias balfouriana (balfour aralia; shown: variegated variety)
1 person has recommended removing this plant from the list.
1 person has recommended not removing this plant from the list.
1 person has recommended combining this plant with Polyscias fruticosa.

110. Polyscias fruticosa (ming aralia)
1 person has recommended removing this plant from the list.
1 person has recommended not removing this plant from the list.
1 person has recommended combining this plant with Polyscias balfouriana.

111. Portulacaria afra cvv. (baby jade plant, elephant bush; shown: P. afra)
1 person has recommended removing this plant from the list.
2 people have recommended not removing this plant from the list.

112. Radermachera sinica (china doll)
1 person has recommended removing this plant from the list.
2 people have recommended not removing this plant from the list.

113. Ravenea rivularis (majesty palm)
2 people have recommended removing this plant from the list.
2 people have recommended not removing this plant from the list.

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The thoughts, opinions, life choices, etc. discussed in this blog are those of its author, and are not necessarily endorsed by his former employer, nor were they ever necessarily endorsed by his former employer before she was former. In fact, I'm pretty sure we disagreed about a lot of stuff, which was additional incentive not to discuss anything that didn't relate pretty directly to plants. And as far as it goes, we disagreed about a fair amount of stuff directly relating to plants, too.

In any case. Nothing in this blog should be taken to represent my former employer's views on anything, except for the few things explicitly identified as her opinions, and even then it's possible I've misunderstood or exaggerated what her actual views were. So if you want to know what she thinks about stuff you should just ask her.